How to do Automated Lead Gen, with Ryan O’Donnell

Episode 112:

Ryan O’Donnell is a midwest kid who moved to NYC after college and landed a job on Wall Street making 500 calls a day. He hated it, followed a passion for tech, and ended up joining a company early that eventually sold to Yahoo for $850M. He grew a business unit from $0 – $20M and left Yahoo to startup.

Fast forward 3 meandering years trying to generate sales and Ryan decided to build a product to speed up the time to revenue for any business selling a product or service B2B called Sellhack. He’s successfully running this company today, helping his clients get in front of the right prospects faster and with a better close rate than they’d been doing on their own. He’s a father of 3, husband, and hobbyist prepper, and he’s in relentless pursuit of scratch golf.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

Why sales is all about automation and efficiency

Using data to take the guesswork out of the prospect search

Crafting compelling emails to prospects based on what you know about their competition (that you already work with)

Figuring out how many prospects you need to capture every week at the top of your sales funnel in order to get the number of new leads you need at the bottom of the funnel

SellHack’s algorithm for verifying the email address of a person who you might just know their name and company

Replyify: a tool specifically devised for sending out cold email campaigns and building a sales process to contact prospects in other ways

Strategies for crafting an email that works for cold selling B2B products and services

How and when to ask to schedule time with a prospect

Tiering your offerings and basing communication with prospects based on the tier

Using the ideas from this podcast not only inside your agency, but also with your clients

For almost 30 years, Drew McLellan has been in the advertising industry. He started his career at Y&R, worked in boutique-sized agencies and then started his own (which he still owns and run) agency in 1995. Additionally, Drew owns and leads Agency Management Institute, which advises hundred of small to mid-sized agencies on how to grow their agency and its profitability through agency owner peer groups, consulting, coaching, workshops and more.